Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> Dé Domh, 2004-04-04 ag 02:53 +0200, scríobh Frans Pop:
>
>> I really think that using the 'really' short names (that is just plain
>> Taiwan instead of Taiwan, P.. of C..) would not be a bad compromise
>> despite what the official so called short UN names say.
And note that it *is* a compromise, since the offical Taiwanese government
version would be short name "China", long name "Republic of China", with
the mainland government being "People's Republic of China".
> Agreed the "official short names" are ugly ;
>
(http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html)
> eg. "LAO PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC", "LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA" for
> those countries normally called "Laos" and "Libya".
Yeah, they are incredibly ugly, aren't they.
Heck; grab a National Geographic Society atlas and see what the political
names used on the map are. Then use those. It's a better standard, at
least for countries which actually exist (doesn't the UN still recognize
some which don't?)
Of course, you could always use the official long names for everyone, thus
abusing nearly everyone with stupid names. ;-) The benefit of the "short"
names is always lost when some of them are stupidly long.
> However, sometimes
> the short version is the problem too: eg. do we allow
> "MACEDONIA, THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF", to be shortened to
> "Macedonia"? I'm sure the Greeks won't agree to that ...
Well, it's only particularly crazy Greek governments which care; most Greeks
accept that Macedonia (the country) is *not* making territorial claims on
Greece Macedonia, and there are lots of other situations in the world where
a country has the same name as a province in a neighboring country.
So I wouldn't worry, as long as this is a list of *countries*, anyway, since
there's no other *country* called Macedonia (given that Greece admits that
Greek Macedonia is part of Greece). It's not like the situation with the
Congo, where there actually are two countries with the same standard name,
or the similar situation which used to be true of Yemen, or further back
Cameroon, etc.
>> After all, isn't Linux for a large part about being "free" as in "able to
>> choose for yourselves" which is what Taiwan has been trying to to for the
>> past decades.
>
> Ironically, one of the main reasons I created the iso-codes package is
> to allow this; if someone wanted to create "Kurdish Linux" and add
> Kurdistan as a territory, then they would only have 1 list to override
> or correct on Linux, rather than n separate lists of countries and
> translations ...
> (But I don't want to fork Debian over this issue :-( )
>
>
>> I think the really short names are often a lot more politically neutral
>> than the semi-official names in iso-3166.
>
> The countries in question have used the list to make their own political
> points; but the problem is that Debian deciding to change some names and
> not others is no longer being neutral.
Well, maybe it would be better to go with a different, less political, more
neutral list, like the names used on the National Geographic Society maps,
for instance. :-O Going with the names used on maps would also guarantee
the selection of genuinely short names, since mapmakers have physical
problems putting overly-long names on their maps, and so won't do it.
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